The following day Claude was again accosted by one of the prisoners named Pernot, as he was brooding in the courtyard.
“Well, Claude, you are sad indeed; what are you pondering over?”
“I fear some evil threatens that good Monsieur D——,” answered Claude.
Claude daily impressed the fact on the inspector how much Albin’s absence affected him, but with no result save four-and-twenty hours’ solitary confinement.
On the 4th of November he looked round his cell for the little that remained to remind him of his former life. A pair of scissors, and an old volume of the “Emile,” belonging to the woman he had loved so well, the mother of his child—how useless to a man who could neither work nor read!
As Claude walked down the old cloisters, so dishonoured by its new inmates and its fresh white-washed walls, he noticed how earnestly the convict Ferrari was looking at the heavy iron bars which crossed the window.
“To-night I will cut through those bars with these scissors,” pointing to the pair he still held in his hand.
Ferrari laughed incredulously, and Claude joined in the mirth. During the day he worked with more than ordinary ardour, wishing to finish a straw hat, which he had been paid for in advance by a tradesman at Troyes, M. Bressier.
Shortly before noon he made some excuse to go down into the carpenters’ quarters, a story below his own, at the time the warders were absent.
Claude received a hearty welcome, as he was equally popular here as elsewhere.